1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for managing metadata in a portable terminal. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and method for efficiently managing files stored in an external memory of the portable terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of electronic and communication industries over the years, portable terminals are now widely used. In response to user demands, portable terminals having various functions in addition to the main communication function are being developed.
For example, portable terminals are now available that can provide a variety of multimedia functions and services, such as a phone book function, a game function, a short message service, an e-mail service, a wake-up call function, an MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) player function, a digital camera function, a wireless internet service, etc.
As portable terminals become more efficient and multi functional, a large amount of data needs to be stored in an internal memory of the portable terminal to support the additional functions and increased efficiency. For storing the additional data, an external memory can be additionally used to overcome limitations of the internal memory of the portable terminal.
When an external memory is used with a portable terminal, metadata located in the external memory must be managed by the portable terminal. To manage metadata for a file which exists in the external memory, upon insertion of the external memory into the portable terminal, a file within the external memory is searched and analyzed. Metadata is extracted according to a request by an application with which the file is to be used, and the extracted metadata is stored in an internal space of the portable terminal (i.e. database, etc.). Thereby, a requested operation is performed. For example, for a music file, information comprising a genre, a musician, an album, etc. is extracted from the music file, and the extracted metadata is stored together with a name of each file. For an image file, information comprising a color, a composition, a generation time, etc. is extracted from the image file, and the extracted information is stored together with a name of each file.
However, an external memory has a considerably lower access speed as compared with an internal memory of the portable terminal. Thus, more time is needed to analyze a file and extract metadata from the file located in the external memory. In addition, upon removal of the external memory from the portable terminal, metadata stored in the portable terminal is removed. Thus, repetitive insertion and removal for the external memory increases overhead by repetitive extraction and removal of the metadata. Therefore, a need exists for an improved apparatus and method for managing metadata in a portable terminal.